Reporting Conflict

James Rodgers

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780230274464
• eBook ISBN: 9781350306578
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Journalisme

In Reporting Conflict, a correspondent turned lecturer draws on his personal experience of journalism in wartime. The author, James Rodgers, has reported on world-changing conflicts. The book combines reflection on this personal experience with an assessment of other accounts of journalism in wartime, and academic studies on the subject.

1	From cavalry charges to citizen journalism – a brief history of conflict reporting

---

The journalist working in wartime is a figure who has been lionized, satirized and despised. Reporters covering conflict seem to hold a special place in the public perception of journalism: at times, they are seen as brave and noble, at others, foolhardy and self-serving. Although accounts of combat are as old as war itself, it was not until the nineteenth century that the kind of conflict reporting we are used to today first emerged. William Howard Russell, The Times correspondent in the Crimea, is often considered one of the first, if not the first, war correspondents. He has a much less well-known namesake, James Russell, who might now also be considered a trailblazer. James Russell was a Searjent¹ Major in the Scots Grays at the Battle of Waterloo. The day after what he called ‘a most Bloody Battle with the French as ever was fought’, he wrote a letter to his family to let them know that he had survived. I will look at this letter and the wider significance of correspondence like it in greater detail towards the end of the chapter, but I choose it as a starting point because it not only predates what we have come to think of as the conventional model of war reporting, but also includes some of the great techniques of that model – compelling narrative, detail and an awareness of the wider strategic picture – and anticipates some of the kinds of war reporting that are beginning to influence the one to which we have become accustomed.

Recent studies of conflict reporting, such as Piers Robinson et al.’s Pockets of Resistance: British News Media, War, and Theory in the 2003 Invasion of Iraq (2010), have tended to analyse the finished product, without always considering the process of newsgathering in the kind of detail offered by journalists’ memoirs. While Phillip Knightley’s The First Casualty (1989) remains unsurpassed as a history of journalism in wartime, it predates the end of the Cold War, and the attacks of September 11 2001. Susan Carruthers’s impressive The Media at War, recently updated (2011), includes a detailed assessment of that period but does not give the reader enough of a sense of primary newsgathering, the daily work of reporters, work that is continually evolving, but which remains the most important part of the process. Morrison and Tumber’s Journalists at War – their account of the coverage of the Falklands conflict of 1982 – examines that process in detail, and is still invaluable reading today, but has now been overtaken by new wars, and new technology. My approach will be to try to fill in those gaps by drawing on my own experience as a journalist, the accounts of other journalists, and with reference to existing academic studies.

The forces that shape journalism in wartime can be divided into three broad categories: personal, political and technological. The personal ones are those which affect the journalist in the place where they are working: access; the company in which they find themselves; and the journalist’s own involvement in the action. The history of conflict reporting shows that there are two further factors above all others that have shaped it beyond the personal level: politics, and technology. Professional ideas of objectivity and ethics are also important, and fit into the personal and political categories. Throughout this book, politics and technology will be the factors to which I will return in order to explain how conflict reporting works now, and how it is likely to work in the future. By politics, I mean the international political and diplomatic situation at any given time. I take this in the widest possible sense, to include, naturally, economic factors, but also social ones, such as cultural and religious attitudes. These decide which conflicts arise, who is drawn into them, who needs to know about them, and who tries to influence the way that information is or is not distributed. This was as true for William Howard Russell as it has been for me and my contemporaries who have covered conflict in the post-Cold War, post-September 11 world.

William Howard Russell was as a pioneer because he was an observer, not a combatant or civilian taking part in the action voluntarily or otherwise. Russell was a civilian who went to a conflict zone specifically to relay his account of what was happening there back to an audience² in another place. He did this in the Crimean War of the 1850s. Britain and France, bitter enemies some four decades earlier when James Russell was fighting, had become allies against Russia (Figes, 2010). William Howard Russell cannot, perhaps, be considered a fully neutral observer: he was working for a newspaper, The Times, which had enormous influence on public opinion and policy in the home country of one of the belligerents. His use of the first-person plural, ‘we’, ‘us’ and ‘our’, would jar with some modern ideas of the reporter’s impartiality but they do have their contemporary equivalent in the ‘our boys’ that some British newspapers have used much more recently to describe British troops. Nevertheless, Russell’s presence as a witness, rather than an actor – he was neither a combatant nor a local resident – marks his as a new role. More importantly for what followed, it defined the model of the war correspondent which would endure for the rest of the nineteenth century, through the twentieth and into our own. His reporting is not only remembered because of its historical significance. It has lasted because it still reads so well today, more than a century and a half later. Take his account of the disastrous charge of the Light Cavalry Brigade:

At ten minutes past eleven, our Light Cavalry Brigade advanced. As they rushed towards the front, the Russians opened on them from the guns in the redoubt on the right with volleys of musketry and rifles. They swept proudly past, glittering in the morning sun in all the pride and splendour of war.

(2008: 127)

There follows a detailed and dramatic description of the action, which ends with massive losses, before Russell asks us to glance again at his watch, and see how many casualties have been suffered in how little a time: ‘At thirty-five minutes past eleven, not a British soldier, except the dead and dying, was left in front of these bloody Muscovite guns’ (ibid.: 128).

Describing the aftermath of a later action in the campaign, Russell shows his skill in one of the arts of the great reporter: creating a sense of place, of action, which brings the audience, however far physically removed, almost to his side, to see what he sees:

It was agonizing to see the wounded men who were lying there under a broiling sun, parched with excruciating thirst, racked with fever, and agonized with pain – to behold them waving their caps faintly, or making signals towards our lines, over which they could see the white flag waving.

(ibid.: 220)

The contrast with the description higher up of the ‘pride and splendour of war’ is striking. Russell’s portrayal of this side of death and conflict – no heroic death here, just unimaginable suffering – is one that finds echoes in the work of many of those who followed his example in later years, and went to wars to write about them.

War is more than anything a terribly squalid business. On the wireless or in a paper it appears clear-cut, a question of strategy, gains and losses. Here you see files of hang-dog prisoners, churches, farmhouses, cottages, mined and passed over, where tanks have come to grips and men died by the hundred.

(Moynihan, 1994: 62)

So wrote Michael Moynihan in War Correspondent, his account of reporting on some of the most decisive battles of the Second World War. The words ‘on the wireless or in a paper’ seem outdated in our multi-platform world but the sentiment endures. Those of us who have tried to describe conflict in our reporting have all experienced this sense of squalor, and how it contrasts with statements of advances, and clinical destruction of enemies, issued by suited prime ministers or immaculately uniformed staff officers in the controlled environments of governmental news conferences. That contrast has always been one of the main challenges facing the professional reporter whose task it has been to convey the action to an audience near or far, in danger, or just interested. Since the 1850s, when William Howard Russell rose to fame, that task has largely been carried out in a way which he himself would readily recognize – in approach, if not in technology.

From the Crimea to the Second World War

Increasing literacy and better transport meant that newspapers’ circulation grew as the nineteenth century progressed. For Britain, an expanding empire brought a desire and a need to learn of distant conflicts for the way in which they had an impact on life at home: politics and technology shaped newsgathering and distribution as they do today. The First World War brought troops from the far corners of that empire to fight in Flanders and France. Correspondents came too. That war also changed the way in which western Europe understood conflict. Aerial bombardments and machine guns – the mechanical horrors of war in the twentieth century – crushed ideas of heroic cavalry charges. Those reporters who did travel to the battlefields to relay events back to the population at home enjoyed the benefits of ever-improving communications, but also fell victim to censorship: some they had imposed on them by governments; some they willingly consented to provide themselves (Knightley, 1989; Carruthers, 2011). These ideas of technological advance and editorial control continued to develop side by side (Schneider, 2011: 32), often competing against each other as they do to this day (Robinson et al., 2010: 29). There was enormous social change too – nowhere more than on the other side of Europe from the mud of Flanders, in Russia. The Russian revolution was chronicled by western correspondents – among them, the future children’s author, Arthur Ransome (Chambers, 2009) – who witnessed events that would shape the entire twentieth century.

It was Ransome’s contemporary, John Reed, though, who has left us the most famous journalistic account of the time when Russia tore apart its old order as it sought to create a new world. John Reed was a foreigner, an American, yet he believed passionately in the ideals of the Bolsheviks who took power and set up the Soviet state. His Ten Days That Shook the World (1977) is the story of an armed struggle for power, which was not a conventional war, and, as such, even though it tells the story of a revolution that happened almost a century ago, it contains many lessons that are relevant today: ideas of objectivity, freedom of the press, a reporter’s purpose and propaganda. John Reed’s experiences and techniques would have been readily recognized by William Howard Russell, half a century before. They also seem familiar to me and my contemporaries, who began our careers in the 1990s, covering the collapse of the system whose birth Reed himself recorded. He seeks to witness as much himself as he can and, when events conspire against him, he finds the people who were there to help him complete his story. There is a reminder of the role that reporters themselves play when Reed sees the following scene in the streets of St Petersburg: ‘a man appeared with an armful of newspapers, and was immediately stormed by frantic people, offering a rouble, five roubles, ten roubles, tearing at each other like animals’ (1977: 95).

Reed himself is dismissive of what the ‘frantic people’ end up with: he calls it ‘a feverish little sheet of four pages, containing no news’ (ibid.: 95–6). It is nevertheless a moment when the correspondent in the middle of a conflict is shown the value of journalism itself. When I was covering the war in Chechnya in 1995 and later, we western reporters used to carry cigarettes, chocolate and other small gifts to help break the ice with combatants. What Russian soldiers wanted most of all, though, were newspapers – and a ten-day-old copy of a national paper from Moscow was considered a great prize.

In the Second World War, troops were sent across the world to different theatres of combat, and correspondents went with them. Advances in technology had facilitated the broadcasting process, increasing its importance. Radio became the medium with the greatest influence: think of wartime addresses by leaders designed to inspire suffering and fearful nations, think of the propaganda each belligerent used to undermine the morale of the enemy’s population. With the sense that many nations were fighting for their very survival, with the sense that going to war with Nazi Germany was a moral obligation, this was a time when few correspondents tried to adhere to traditional notions of objectivity (Carruthers, 2011: 78, 129). It seemed out of place against a foe that many considered the greatest evil, and greatest threat to Europe, in the twentieth century, and perhaps of all time. There was a sense in which this was used to legitimize censorship. As Asa Briggs wrote in The BBC: The First Fifty Years, ‘Censorship, according to the American journalist Quentin Reynolds, who was to make a reputation later as a broadcaster, was “petty, absurd, tyrannical”’ (1985: 178). Still, as Briggs also notes, this did not pose a major ethical dilemma for BBC staff, working under threat of Nazi invasion.

Indeed while the Battle of Britain lasted, BBC staff felt themselves to be in the front line, carrying out essential war duties and ensuring that, unlike the German broadcasting system, where on a bad day most German transmitters were off the air, ‘we never closed’.

(ibid.: 194)

If in this case the issue of moral judgement and how it might apply to professional ethics was easily resolved, it serves to illustrate a question which almost every journalist covering conflict has had to consider at one time or another: who is in the right here, and how should that be reflected in my reporting?

Access and objectivity

For Vassily Grossman, covering the Second World War for Krasnaya Zvezda (‘Red Star’ – the newspaper of the Soviet Army) – this was no dilemma demanding lengthy consideration. As well as a committed believer in the Soviet system, Grossman was Jewish. The town where his mother lived had been occupied by the Nazis relatively early in the war. As he reports from the fighting, in the thick of all the horrors of the eastern front, he allows himself to wonder what might have happened to his mother. However tireless, dedicated and, in Grossman’s case, unfailingly brilliant, a combat reporter may be, there are moments when he or she has also to reflect that they remain a human being, a citizen, a daughter or a son. Grossman has one such moment of personal emotion when he is following the Red Army westwards, as it drives back the invader, and he pauses to think of his mother,

No I don’t believe she is still alive. I travel all the time around areas that have been liberated, and I see what these accursed monsters have done to old people and children. And Mama was Jewish. A desire to exchange my pen for a rifle is getting stronger and stronger in me.

(2006: 224)

When the correspondent is unquestioningly patriotic, as Grossman was at that time, his or her work poses little challenge to the authorities. When the aims of the party in conflict are at odds with the purpose of the reporter, tension inevitably arises (Morrison and Tumber, 1988: 21, 44; Carruthers, 2011: 56). Each army in each war has tried to refine the relationship it wants to have with journalists, and the result has been everything from ‘you can do what you like but careful you keep out of our way’, through varying degrees of control, to total denial of access. Each approach has been examined both at the time and subsequently as a success or a failure, a model to discard, or one to use again in the future. These issues will be examined in greater detail in the next chapter, but the question of differing purpose between army and reporter takes us to the next milestone in the history of war reporting: Vietnam. If the Second World War saw the rise of radio to the height of influence, Vietnam was the first war extensively seen on television (Hallin, 1989: 105), just as the Iraq war of 1991 has often been described as the first war on live television (Thussu, 2003: 118).

Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky devote a large part of their influential work Manufacturing Consent to a consideration of the way that the news media, and television in particular, may or may not have influenced the outcome of the Vietnam War. ‘The standard critique of the media for having “lost the war” identifies television as the major culprit,’ (1994: 199) is how Herman and Chomsky succinctly define an argument which they challenge at length. Instead, they suggest, the US media ‘were so closely wedded to U.S. government goals that they never sought to learn the facts’ (ibid.: 194). In The ‘Uncensored War’, Daniel Hallin concludes that, ‘The collapse of America’s “will” to fight in Vietnam resulted from a political process of which the media were only part’ (1989: 213) divisions in public and political opinion being reflected in coverage, rather than formed by it. All the same, this ‘belief that the media, particularly television, were responsible for U.S. government failures’ (Herman and Chomsky, 1994: 170) made such a big impression that Carruthers, writing of the Gulf War in 1991, found it still stubbornly in existence, even though, as she notes, ‘As in previous wars, the presumed power of images to shatter morale may have been more important than their actual effect’ (2000: 142). I will consider the work of Hallin and Herman and Chomsky on Vietnam in greater detail in Chapter 4, but, to conclude here, there are, in essence, two views: one holds that television reporting of the Vietnam War played a hugely important role in shaping public opinion, a public opinion which, informed about the war, ceased to support US military presence in Vietnam – with the result that the war effort was undermined to the extent that it failed. Others dismiss this as an attempt to deflect the blame from politicians, diplomats and generals and onto the news media. However one sees it, politics affected the way in which the war was reported.

Technology did too. Advances in the distribution of television pictures permitted moving images of the conflict to be brought into the lives of non-combatants thousands of miles away on an unprecedented scale. Audiences started to become used to sitting in their favourite armchair and watching pictures from the thick of the fighting which had only recently been filmed (Sontag, 2003: 18). The emphasis that has been placed on television coverage, though, should not be allowed to eclipse that of journalists working in other media. Some of the most enduring, and, even at this distance, still tr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. From cavalry charges to citizen journalism – a brief history of conflict reporting
• 2. Access
• 3. Objectivity
• 4. How the war was spun: the role of public relations companies, propagandists and governments
• 5. Multi-platform storytelling
• 6. ‘Remember it’s not your war’: reporter involvement
• 7. Not as simple as ‘death or glory’: the future
• Notes
• References
• Index